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Posts Tagged with “cncf”

What a crazy week helping host our annual European community conference in Copenhagen… it’s been wild to see the community grow since the CNCF took over the stewardship of the conference (thank you Joseph Jacks, still remember those conversations we had in the early days):

I have a few hours until I board my flight home so I figure I would share some of my take aways from the event in a series of tweets:

CNCF project adoption and the growth of the End User Community

The amount of end users I’ve bumped into at the conference was incredible, insurance companies, medical, automative, government, airlines, tax offices and more. In Dan Kohn’s keynote, he covered our official CNCF End User Community which was setup as a way to ensure End Users have a voice in CNCF governance:

CNCF has one of the largest, if not largest end user community membership of any open source foundation. I’m proud of what we built and mark my words, there will be a day when the number of official CNCF End Users will outnumber our vendors. Also, I was stoked to announce our first Top End User Award to Bloomberg showcasing one of our official end users using cloud native technology an interesting way:

If you’re using CNCF projects an interesting ways, I implore you to join our official End User Community so you have an official voice and more importantly, learn from other end users deploying CNCF projects.

May a thousand [kubernetes] operators bloom

In my opinion, one of the big themes of the conference was the rise of kubernetes operators. In Brandon Philips keynote, Red Hat (CoreOS) open sourced the Operator Framework which makes it easier to write and build operators:

At the conference itself, there were many projects and companies announcing operators for their project or product (see dotmesh, spark, NATS, vitess, etc), expect this trend to continue and explode over the next year, you can see the growing list of operators out there via awesome-operators repo.

For an effort that started under a year ago, it’s nice to see Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM and other major cloud providers collaborate in the working group and support various open source serverless initiatives, I look forward to what they will do next:

It’s not a surprise that I concur with a lot of these thoughts. In the bootstrapping days of CNCF, we were laying the foundation of projects required to bootstrap the ecosystem around Kubernetes and cloud native. The next step was increasing the reach of Kubernetes outside of just orchestration and focusing on technology areas as storage and security. The future of CNCF is all about increasing the mean time to developer satisfaction by improving the state of developer tooling. We need to get to the same point that developers are with Linux with Kubernetes, while super important foundational technology, developers don’t have to know the intimate details of how these systems work and instead stand on the shoulders of them to build their applications.

Another additional thing I’d like to mention that Alexis didn’t bring up formally. One of my goals in CNCF is to ensure we build a sustainable ecosystem of projects, members and end users. As our ecosystem matures and some of our projects proverbially cross the chasm (we use the graduate parlance in CNCF)…

Kubernetes has graduated out of @CloudNativeFdn incubation. What does that mean?

How do we ensure each of these parties are receiving value from their participation in the foundation? It’s something I think about on a daily basis as more CNCF projects get embedded everywhere, graduate and cross the chasm.

Kubernetes maturing andcontainer standardization unlocks innovation

At the conference, Google open sourced gVisor as another approach to container runtimes which in my biased opinion is made possible due to OCI standardization efforts to allow this type of innovation without fear of breaking compatibility. As part of gVisor, runsc(like runc in OCI) provides an isolation boundary between the application and the host kernel and they have a ton of information in their README about the tradeoffs versus other container runtimes out there:

With more runtimes like gVisor coming out I'm trying to find a good way to abstract the runc CLI so that it's easier for people to build their own when they implement @OCI_ORG specs. This is that I have so far:https://t.co/URQdGqzBA8

There are a lot more things to mention (e.g., rise of enovy and it becoming embedded everywhere, cloud native programming languages, chaos engineering) but I have to now board a flight home and get some sleep. Personally, I’m nothing but humbled by the growth of the community and conference the last few years, it’s been an honor helping build it out since the beginning. If you have any suggestions on improving the event or our community in anyway, please reach out via Twitter or shoot me an email:

completely humbled with how much the @CloudNativeFdn has grown, hope you enjoyed #kubecon#cloudnativecon and please feel free to personally send me feedback on how we can make things better for you in the future

We do listen to feedback and as an example, in Austin, people complained that the videos were taking too long to post and we aimed to have a quicker turn around this time and followed through with that in Copenhagen:

The CNCF is technically a little over two years old and it was about time we start publishing annual reports based on our progress. This is a well treaded path by other open source foundations out there like the Eclipse Foundation and Mozilla so we thank them for inspiration to be more transparent.

Another thing that we launched this week was the Cloud Native Landscape (interactive edition) and more importantly, the Cloud Native Trailmap which guides you through the journey of becoming cloud native by adopting different projects in the foundation.

Finally, it was fantastic for Kubernetes to be the first project to graduate from the CNCF. What does this exactly mean? This is very akin to graduation in other open source foundations such as the ASF. Graduation here is really about confidence in CNCF development processes and really a stamp from the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) on what is a sustainable, production ready and mature open source project you can bet your business on. As projects mature in the CNCF in terms of following solid open source governance processes and become widely adopted, expect to see more projects graduating in the future.

As the first artifacts of the working group, we are happy to announce a whitepaper and landscape to bring some clarity to this early and evolving technology space. The CNCF Serverless WG is also working on a draft specification for describing event data in a common way to ease event declaration and delivery, focused on the serverless space. The goal is to eventually present this project to the CNCF TOC to formalize it as an official CNCF project:

We’re still early days, but in my opinion, serverless is one application/programming built on cloud native technology. There are some open source efforts out there for serverless but they tend to be focused on specific projects (e.g., OpenFaaS, kubeless) versus collaboration across cloud providers and startups. The CNCF is looking to enable collaboration/projects in this space that adhere to our values. What are our values? See these from our charter:

Fast is better than slow. The foundation enables projects to progress at high velocity to support aggressive adoption by users.

Open. The foundation is open and accessible, and operates independently of specific partisan interests. The foundation accepts all contributors based on the merit of their contributions, and the foundation’s technology must be available to all according to open source values. The technical community and its decisions shall be transparent.

Strong technical identity. The foundation will achieve and maintain a high degree of its own technical identify that is shared across the projects.

Clear boundaries. The foundation shall establish clear goals, and in some cases, what the non-goals of the foundation are to allow projects to effectively co-exist, and to help the ecosystem understand where to focus for new innovation.

Scalable. Ability to support all scales of deployment, from small developer centric environments to the scale of enterprises and service providers. This implies that in some deployments some optional components may not be deployed, but the overall design and architecture should still be applicable.

Platform agnostic. The specifications developed will not be platform specific such that they can be implemented on a variety of architectures and operating systems.

Anyways, if you’re interested in this space, I highly recommend you attend the CNCF Serverless WG meetings which are public and currently happen on a weekly basis.

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It was a crazy 2017 for me with 300,000 miles of business travel, but it was all worth it to experience every major cloud provider adopt Kubernetes in some fashion and grow our community to 14 projects total! Also, it was amazing to help host 4000+ people in Austin for KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, where it actually snowed!

I’d like to share some personal take aways I had from the conference (of course with accompanying tweets) that will serve as predictions for 2018:

Exciting Times for Boring Container Infrastructure!

One of the themes from the conference was that the Kubernetes community was working hard to make infrastructure boring. In my humble opinion, Kubernetes becomes something like “POSIX of the cloud” or “Linux of the Cloud” where Kubernetes is solidifying kernel space but the excitement should be in user space.

In 2018, look for the boring infrastructure pattern to continue, the OCI community is planning to make distribution a bit more boring via a proposed distribution API specification. I also predict that some of the specialized/boutique cloud providers who haven’t offered Kubernetes integration will do so finally in 2018.

CNCF + KubeCon and CloudNativeCon: Home of Open Infrastructure

CNCF has a community of independently governed projects, as of today which there are 14 of covering all parts of cloud native. There’s Prometheus which integrates beautifully with Kubernetes but also brings modern monitoring practices to environments outside of cloud native land too! There’s Envoy which is a cloud native edge and proxy, that integrates with Kubernetes through projects like Contour or Istio, however, Envoy can be used in any environment where a reverse proxy is used. gRPC is a universal RPC framework that can help you build services that run on Kubernetes or any environment for that matter! There are many other CNCF projects that have use cases outside of just purely a cloud native environment and we will see more of that usage grow over time to help companies in transition to a cloud native world.

In 2018, look for CNCF conferences continue to grow, expand locations (hello China) and truly become the main event for open source infrastructure. In Austin it was incredible to have talks and people from the Ansible to Eclipse to JVM to Openstack to Zephyr communities (and more). I can’t think of any other event that brings together open source infrastructure across all layers of the cloud native landscape.

Moving up the Stack: 2018 is Year of Service Meshes

Service meshes are fairly a new concept (I highly recommend this blog post by Matt Klein if you’re new to the concept) and will become the middleware of the cloud native world. In CNCF, we currently host Envoy and linkerd which helped poineer this space. In 2018, I expect more service mesh related projects to be open sourced along with more participation from traditional networking vendors. We will also see some of the projects in this space to mature with real production usage.

Cloud Native AI + Machine Learning: Kubeflow

In 2018, ML focused workloads and projects will find ways to integrate with Kubernetes to help scale and encourage portability of infrastructure. Just take a look at the kubeflow project which aims to make ML with Kubernetes easy, portable and scalable. Note, this doesn’t mean that AI/ML folks will have to become Kubernetes experts, all this means is that Kubernetes will be powering more AI/ML workloads (and potentially even sharing their existing cloud native infrastructure). I expect more startups to form in this space (see RiseML as an example), look to see a “cloud native” AI movement that focuses on portability of workloads.

Developer Experience Focus and Cloud Native Tooling

One of my favorite keynotes from KubeCon was Brendan Burns speaking about metaparticle.io, a standard library for cloud native applications. I completely agree with his premise that we need to democratize distributed systems development. Not everyone developer needs to know about Kubernetes the same way not every developer needs to understand POSIX. In 2018, we are going to see an explosion of open source “cloud native languages” that will offer multiple approaches to democratizing distributed systems development.

Also in 2018, I expect us to see growth in cloud native development environments (IDEs) to provide better developer experience. As an example, for those that were wondering why there was an Eclipse Foundation booth at KubeCon, they were demoing a technology called Eclipse Che which is a cloud native IDE framework (your workspace is composed of docker/container images). Che is a framework that helps you build Cloud Native IDEs too, for example, OpenShift.io is OpenShift integrated with Che to provide you a fully blown online development experience.

Finally in 2018, I expect the developer experience of installing Kubernetes applications improved, including the underlying technology for doing so. For example, the Service Catalog work and websites like kubeapps.com showcase what is possible in making it easier for people to install Kubernetes app/integrations, we’ll see this grow significantly in 2018. Also I predict that the Helm community will grow faster than it has before.

Diversity and Inclusion

One of my favorite take aways from the conference was the focus on diversity and inclusion within our community:

https://twitter.com/CloudNativeFdn/status/938435795022745600

We (thank you amazing diversity committee) raised $250,000 and helped over 100 diversity scholarship recipients attend KubeCon/CloudNativeCon in Austin. In 2018, I predict and truly hope some other event will match or beat this.

Anyways, after a crazy 2017, I can’t wait to grow our communities in 2018.

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A little over two years ago after five years of service at Twitter, I took the opportunity to build an open source foundation from scratch using some of the computing techniques we experimented with at Twitter:

https://twitter.com/cra/status/937460286210048000

I was initially excited about the idea because of my experience with open source foundations in previous lives, from being involved with the Eclipse Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation plus part of the early discussions around OpenStack governance formation. I viewed this as an opportunity to learn from the lessons of other foundations and do something new and modern in the GitHub era, along with of course making our own mistakes. You really don’t get many opportunities to start an open source foundation from scratch that will impact the whole industry.

Stepping back, the original idea behind the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) was to promote a method of computing (we call it cloud native) pioneered by internet scale giants such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and so on and bring it to the rest of the industry. If you looked inside these companies, you can see they were running services at scale, packaged in containers, orchestrated by some central system.

We still have a long way to go within CNCF to truly making cloud native computing ubiquitous across the industry, but I’m excited to see so many companies and individuals come together under CNCF to make this happen, especially as we have our largest annual gathering this week, KubeCon/CloudNativeCon. Personally, I’m nothing but thrilled to what the future holds and truly lucky to be serving our community under the auspices of the foundation.

A special thank you to Craig McLuckie, Sarah Novotny, Todd Moore, Ken Owens, Peixin Hou, Doug Davis, Jeffrey Borek, Jonathan Donaldson, Carl Trieloff, Chris Wright and many other folks that were at that CNCF first board meeting two years ago bootstrapping the foundation.

This also marks for the first time in the history of our industry that these leading cloud providers are working together in the same open source focused foundation to move the state of the art infrastructure forward.

Also last week I had the opportunity to bring in two new high quality cloud native projects into CNCF. Envoy is a high-performance open source edge and service proxy that makes the network transparent to applications. Jaeger is an open source distributed tracing system inspired by Google Dapper paper and OpenZipkin community. It can be used for tracing microservice-based architectures. Uber began deploying Jaeger internally in 2015. It is now integrated into thousands of microservices and recording thousands of traces every second.

Anyways, this is one of the reasons I enjoy working in open source today, bringing together diverse (and even competing) companies to build a better world by collaborating in the open!

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It’s been a little over a year and a half since I started to help build the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) from scratch. One of our original goals was to build a modern open source foundation focused on a new form of cloud computing called “cloud native” (essentially think of microservices that run in containers that are orchestrated) and to get all the major cloud providers at the table to adopt this form of computing.

Last week, we were happy to welcome AWS to CNCF as a member and that now brings us to having the top five cloud providers in the world at the table committing to adopting and promoting cloud native computing:

First off, it’s always great to see an original vision of when we started CNCF come into reality, you can read more from Adrian Cockcroft why they decided to join CNCF and support cloud native computing.

Second, I think it’s great to see a company like Amazon expanding its open source efforts as they where one of the last large companies without a formal open source program. They recently started an official open source program office @AWSOpen under the leadership of Adrian Cockroft and Zaheda Borat and it’s been great to have them participate in the TODO Group too!

Anyways, always great to see large and impactful companies increase their commitment to open source. Now it’s interesting to think what large companies out there don’t have an official open source program or strategy (I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader).

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In early September, CNCF will be announcing the founding class of Kubernetes Certified Service Providers (KCSPs). If your company provides professional services to support Kubernetes deployments, please consider signing up to become part of the founding class.The main benefits of becoming a KCSP are:

Placement in a new section at the top of https://kubernetes.io/partners/

Three or more engineers who pass the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam

Demonstrable activity in the Kubernetes community including active contribution

A business model to support enterprise end users, including putting engineers at a customer site

The CKA exam is about to enter early release beta testing prior to the public release in September. It is an online, proctored, performance-based test that requires solving multiple issues from a command line. It takes 3 to 4 hours to complete, and costs $300, though a discount is available for beta testers to $100.

If your company is interested in becoming a KCSP, please do the following 4 things:

Ensure that your company is listed athttps://kubernetes.io/partners/and if not (or if the listing should be updated), please do so via the linkat the top of that page.

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Over the past few months I’ve been helping form an infrastructure focused open source foundation (from scratch) and acting as its interim Executive Director. I’m thrilled to announce that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has accepted its first project, Kubernetes:

There’s a ton of work to do still around developing and evolving development processes, but I’m happy to have our first project which will collaborate with us to establish and evolve these processes (along with the other projects that get accepted).

In the end, it’s really been an adventure in setting up this new open source foundation and I definitely need to write a blog post on some of the lessons learned so far about the experience. I’m really looking forward to see the CNCF become a cloud native commons home for many projects, move the cloud native computing paradigm forward and define what it means to be an open source foundation in the modern GitHub era.